4 tones in Mandarin

After reading my first two blogs, if you haven’t studied any Chinese, you may wonder what the numbers are behind the pinyin. Well, let me explain it to you in this blog.

Chinese is a tonal language. Mandarin, the official Chinese language, has four tones and a neutral tone. The first tone is a high, level tone. That is when we put a number 1 after the pinyin. It sounds like when singing the note "la". The second tone is a rising tone. That is when we put a number 2 after the pinyin. It sounds like "far" when asking "Is it far?" The third tone is a falling-and-rising tone that starts mid-low, moves to the bottom of your voice and then rises to the middle. That is when we put a number 3 after the pinyin. It sounds like when you say "so?" irritably. The fourth tone is a falling tone. That is when we put a number 4 after the pinyin. It sounds like when you adamantly saying "No!".

If you are interested to find more information about the tones, please click here, you will get a better understanding.

Dogs in Chinese eyes

For western calendar, it is already a new year. But for most traditional Chinese, our time is still lingering around the end of the year of the Dog. Dog is always loved by foreigners. You can tell by looking at the English idioms about dogs:
“Big dog” which means very important person.
“Love me, love my dog” which means if you love someone, you should accept everything and everyone that person loves.

Well, in china, dogs don’t have so good reputation. The idioms in Chinese about dogs are normally bad:
Gou3ji2tiao4qiang2 which literally means an irritated dog will jump over the wall. Now it is normally used to describe that a desperate person will do anything or something dangerous.
Gou3zui3li3tu3bu2chu1xiang4ya2 which literally means that it’s impossible for a dog to spit out an ivory. Now it is normally used to describe that a bad person has filthy mouth and he can’t say anything decent.

There are still a lot more idioms about dogs in Chinese. Though none of them has good meaning but at least that means dogs are still very close to people’s life. Now do you think you know more about the dogs in Chinese eyes? My next blog will be about the next year’s animal: “pig”, the controversial animal. Do you think piggy is cute? Do you think piggy is dirty? Wait for my next blog.

Company outing turns Chinglish

Recently we had our company outing in Qingyue, a hot spring place about a one hour drive away from Guangzhou. On the program there where great activities like seeing the “far between” plants, some “sliding” as well as some serious “field operations”. Huh? Wonder what that is? Me too. Those readers who are living in China know the funny situation where they discover signs or menus in restaurants that offer delicious menus like a “Good to eat mountain” or a “The farmer is small to fry king” plate (found on: http://rahoi.com/2006/03/may-i-take-your-order.php).

Like the Xinhua News Agency tells us in October 15, 2006, the city of Beijing is now, certainly in preparation for the millions of foreign visitors coming to the Olympic games in 2008, trying to standardize use of English on public signs (http://www.china.org.cn/english/2006/Oct/183982.htm). Well, I would say it is about time, guys. Hopefully other cities like Guangzhou and Shenzhen will follow this good example?

Bringing learning to life

With our online courses we bring learning to life..... Not convinced? Read some of the comments Michelle Duncan, one of our Survival students, made about some of the stories in our Functional Study section.

In the General Mandarin units -

I'm convinced Brian is really a girl

Jerry has no body in one scene

Sometimes Holly has no face

George has no personality

Jill's a whiner baby (especially level 2 unit 5)

Level 2 Unit 6 is just sad, sad, sad

Jerry sounds like the turtle ("dude") in Finding Nemo

The General Mandarin section of the online course has stories to present the language using our Mixed-Code method. To learn more about our online courses click here.

Does your room have a name?

The idea of naming each of the 5 classrooms has been brought up a long time ago. We came up with loads of ideas, such as countries’ names, numbers, flowers, festivals, etc. But none of them can give us the feeling of “yes, that is the name we want!!” We want the name to be easy, related to Chinese culture, at the same time the students can use them in their daily life. One meeting, we came up with the idea of Chinese historical places, such as the Great Wall, the Forbidden City. We tried to find some famous historical places in the south, but most of these places are in Beijing. None of them were in Guangzhou. So we were stuck again.

One day, on the bus back home, one idea strike me like a lightening. Why don’t we use the 5 elements? In Chinese it is called “wu3 xing2” which is a basic component of the unique Chinese culture. The five elements are wood (mu4), fire (huo3), earth (tu3), metal (jin1) and water (shui3). Each of these elements symbolizes a particular category of things or motions. They are the basic substances necessary for life. At the same time, they are promoting and restricting each other. Aren’t them the perfect names for the rooms? I was very excited about my thought.

The next day, the first thing I did was to tell our Center Manager my idea. He agreed and so did the other teachers.

So now if you walk into our office, you can walk in the shui3 room or the jin1room. That’s the whole story to name our rooms. Do you have better ideas?

Santa Pub Crawl - 8th Dec

Backing up to before the New Year and Guangzhou had its yearly Santa Pub Crawl. A turn out of somewhere near to 150 guys and girls dressed up as Santa (or Father Christmas for the Brits). From bar to bar, drink to drink, we headed around the city spreading merry greetings.

With a mix of all nationalities it was a truely international xmas gathering that I was invited to and in turn invited the NCM students to. I never knew Santa was a beer drinker!! HoHoHo!!